Elon Musk Launches Company To Merge Human Brains With AI

Trending News: Elon Musk's New Company Wants To Turn Us All Into Cyborgs

Long Story Short

It looks like Elon Musk now wants to interface our brains with AI. Seriously.

Long Story

If you think you’re busy, try being Elon Musk. Because other than popularizing the electric car, designing reusable space rockets and attempting to sell an entire power system to Australia, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur now wants to basically turn us all into cyborgs.

This is not an April Fool’s joke. The Wall Street Journalreports that Musk has launched a new company, Neuralink, with the aim of interfacing brains with computers.

The startup has hardly any public presence, but Musk is said to have an active role in what has been listed in California as a “medical research company”. The first goal of Neuralink is to use implanted chips and tiny computers to treat cranial disease, with the glorious end game (for the company, not the world, hopefully) of a human-computer hybrid.

To that end it has already made several significant hires from the academic community. Among them are nano tech expert Venessa Tolosa, a principal investigator at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and UCSF professor Philip Sabes, who appeared at the Musk-sponsored Beneficial AI conference in January.

The plan is to prototype the technology before rolling it out for human trials. But how many (healthy) people are keen to sign up to have their skulls cracked open will be interesting to see — much of the inner workings of the brain are still a mystery to modern science.

For his part, Musk has hinted at his interest in human-computer link-ups a few times over the past year, including comments in Dubai in February that suggested that a brain-computer hybrid was the only way to ensure the future of the human race.